To Be This Expendable
by Suit Yourself
Summary: The first test of the nightblood solution has failed, and Emori is dead. The second test subject, John Murphy, is being prepped. Raven Reyes can do nothing but watch. (AU where pseudo-Baylis doesn't exist.)


"Where is she? What happened? Clarke!" Roan tightened his hands around Murphy's upper arms in a hold that was almost painful to look at. Murphy squirmed in his grasp, jerking forward violently and trying, to no avail, to break free. His eyes were wild, shaking, moist. Turbulent as a raging sea as they studied Clarke shifting uneasily beneath their gaze.

Then they turned onto Raven and she found the pressure of them to be insurmountable as he began to scream her name. "Reyes! Raven, please! Tell me!" The fact that he was appealing to her was a blatant sign of his desperation. And she knew that he had to know that there was no good news to be unearthed. That had the test been a success they would be clapping each other on the back, celebrating the continued survival of the human race. Instead they looked like mourners, standing graveside and gawking down at the decaying remains of their humanity. Hope was a troubling stubborn thing, though, and clearly he was refusing to abandon it. Refusing to accept that they had truly and ruthlessly murdered the love of his life.

She wanted to hold fast to his gaze, to bear it if only because he was owed at least that much human decency, but soon her eyes were on the tiled ground and her fists were clenched to the point where her nails began to penetrate the soft flesh of her palm to draw forth beads of blood. She grit her teeth and cursed herself for her cowardice, but she could not bring her eyes back up until she was certain that Murphy's would no longer be on her.

When she finally chanced a peek at him he was shaking and tears were streaming down his pale skin as those intense blue eyes settled on the still form lying beneath a bloodied sheet on one of the operating tables. He no longer fought against Roan, he was limp even before Jackson plunged the needle in the side of his neck. Raven caught a brief glimpse of his eyes rolling back, blue fading in place of white, before his eyelids battered closed and his head lolled back onto Roan's sturdy chest.

Roan swooped him up into his arms like he was an empty duffel bag, before dropping him down onto the vacant table a few paces away. Raven couldn't feel her body. It seemed as though every piece of her had become liken until her leg, numb, inert, and useless. Yet again John Murphy was causing her pain. Yet again he was tearing into her flesh and ripping her apart. And here she had thought that he had changed his ways.

Her mouth felt dry as Clarke stepped up to Murphy's prone form with a darker than black needle in her hand. She swallowed frantically, taking in air was becoming far more of a challenge than it had any right to be. "Clarke," she hissed, her voice still all but lost within the confines of the giant knot growing in her chest. "Please," she whispered, managing to take on a bit more volume now. "You can't do this. You _know_ that you can't do this." Killing Emori was one thing, one horrible, unforgivable thing, but this…This was impossible. So, eerily inhumane that the thought of them actually going through with it seemed far off and sickening, a sequence of events that could only transpire in a universe where love and light existed merely as abstract concepts.

Clarke didn't meet her gaze. She was solely focused on the perilous task of shedding herself of her pesky soul. Her muscles were tense, her lips were taut, and her eyes were set in cruel concentration. She placed the thin, venomous tip of the needle against the milky softness of his arm and held it looming above the branches of blue spreading out beneath his skin. She moved to puncture them, but Raven hurriedly grabbed her hand in her own, loosely wrapping her fingers over her muscles as she slowly shook her head. "We've done enough," she argued, "We tried, failed, we don't have to do this anymore. We don't have to kill him too."

Finally Clarke's sharp eyes did chance a meeting with Raven's orbs of burning anguish, but she simply shook her head in return and threw Raven's hand off of hers. "I have to know that I did everything in my power to save my people. To save humanity. I don't want to do this, but it has to be done. Besides, the solution should work now. It has to. If he dies, then we all will."

Raven bit down on her bottom lip, squeezing the smooth pink to force her mouth closed, to keep her voice in. The inevitability of the waking nightmare she currently occupied was all she had to hold fast too. The thought that nothing could be done, that it was beyond her to stop this and doom the world simply for the sake of the boy who had shot her.

She caught Abby's eyes on her, her features reflecting paternal pity and the sad understanding of a doctor who knew that there was no hope for their patient. She hadn't been able to plunge the needle into Emori. That had been Clarke. And Raven imagined that the thought of injecting the misguided kid who had stolen meds for a sick child under her care just a few days back wrenched her gut with four times the force. So again, it was up to Clarke. Up to Clarke to sacrifice the delinquent who had been there with her from the moment her feet first hit the ground. The one who had gotten strung up because of her false accusations towards him _. Gotten banished. Gotten tortured_.

But, Raven, well, she and Abby would hide behind the lack of needles in their hands. Would cling with righteous devotion to the false notion that the word bystander was always connotative of the word innocent. Because Raven couldn't be responsible for this. She would argue and shout and all the while pretend like she had done her best to stop it, like she didn't know how necessary it was. Like she wasn't letting it happen.

It was startling just how little she hated him, really. Even after all the wrongs he had done, _done against her_ , there were no pieces of her left that resented him. She cared despite herself, cared enough that attaining objectivity towards the circumstances set before her was an infeasible hurdle. She wanted to let it happen. Because sacrifices were necessary for the sake of humanity, because he wasn't worth as much as a world full of the doomed. But she felt like she was watching Clarke stab that knife into Finn all over again. The sharp, unbearable sting of a mandatory betrayal.

She wondered how Clarke could bear to do this time and time again. If it was strength or sadism. But no, Clarke cared. She always cared. Raven knew that she did, but in this moment, and all those that had came before it, she hated her. Her brain distorted her until she ceased to be a fearless leader and became nothing but a faceless monster ripping away everything and everyone she had ever come to care for.

And then the needle was burrowed in his arm and the inevitability was realized. His blood was soon to be black now. And after that, it would be spewing out of his mouth in a steady stream of death-inducing sludge.

She had never stayed so still for so long as she did during those two hours of waiting. Waiting for the blood to infect him, dilute him, prepare him for the altar. She thought her leg might give out during those one-hundred and twenty minutes of sustainable torture, and if it had she wasn't sure that she could have found it in her to care. She could imagine tumbling to the ground, falling, falling and letting the floor swell beneath her and swallow her whole.

Then Roan lifted him away from Clarke and her. She wanted to reach her hand out, to steal him back and vanish with him in a plume of smoke to a world where love and light would be free for the taking. _Their taking_.

Instead, the blissfully unconscious boy was tossed into a radioactive oven where his skin would be boiled like a pot of water above licking flames and his life would evaporate into the steamy air around them. The glass closed around him and Raven's breath hitched, the noise harsh on her ears in the crystallized domain of silence, which had formerly only been punctuated by steady, mechanical beeps.

 _Please. Forgive me._

She had forgiven him. But this wasn't the same, was it? Not at all. This was savagery. This was murder.

Raven couldn't hear Abby's soft words over the sound of her own heartbeat thumping against her torso, clawing at her insides to escape from a body that was no longer deserving of its services.

He looked so small. Enclosed by glass like bacteria beneath the lens of a microscope. So insignificant in the shadow of the universe surrounding it, the multi-celled organisms towering above it, the lives that mattered. Was he even human or had they ripped away his humanity when they purged themselves of their own?

Raven couldn't really imagine what it was like to be this expendable. All her life she had been special, smart, _better_. She had been the youngest Zero-G mechanic, the prodigy. When her life was in danger people cared. They worried that they wouldn't be able to manage without her. Sometimes the whole world relied upon her. But here Murphy was, being shown that in the end, his only real worth was as a sacrificial lamb. His only true purpose for being born was too die. The closest she had ever come to tasting inadequacy was while she was still getting used to walking with a brace. But Murphy, he had always been inadequate, hadn't he? Sure he'd had his moments, saving the world from Alie with Clarke and the like, but in the end this was where that got him. In the end, no one cared enough to stop it.

She wondered what Clarke was thinking. Wondered if she was still trying to distance herself from it all. She looked so cold-pressed and professional, all grit and will of steel. The pain was barely evident in her eyes, but Raven could still see it there. She was miserable, and that, at least, was a comfort. Murphy would want her to be miserable. He'd want them all to be miserable. To live with the guilt of it for the rest of their short lives; the memory of what they had done to him and Emori shredding them apart until their own skin boiled and their own hearts stopped.

Raven felt salty water begin to cascade down her cheeks and she wondered what Murphy would think about that. About her crying over him. She wondered if she even had the right.

All was calm for a passing period. Breaths were bated as the level of radiation went up, up, up. And then it hit.

It began to destroy him.

Raven had known that it was coming, that soon the effects would begin to show and he would cease to be a peaceful, slumbering boy and become a suffering lab rat. In one wave of violent, black-blooded coughing, all hope was lost.

Raven decided that from that point on it was imperative that she keep her brain from referring to him as a _him._

The subject's flesh was no longer billowy and cream-tinted, no, it had fast become red hot and enraged. Bumping up and blistering like there were bugs scurrying about beneath it. The subject appeared to be in pain, excruciatingly so. Its limbs were flailing, trying desperately to break free of the restraints that barred them. Blood was still collecting in the subject's mouth, staining its teeth a sickly shade, like they had all simultaneously rotted from the gum out. And soon black was trickling down from the subject's nose, as well. Its face was just a mass of marred flesh with smears of murky goop sloshing over it. Black splatters hit the glass as though an artist had flicked their dirty paintbrush against the surface. The subject's body was still thrashing against the loose fastenings keeping it at bay, but the force behind the motions was clearly dwindling. The set of unbearably blue eyes jolted open and for the briefest of seconds attracted those of the observer. She saw something in them that made her look away. A simple question in those eyes that she could not answer.

And then the subject was screaming out in anguish. _Murphy_ was screaming out in anguish and neutrality was a luxury that Raven no longer felt she could afford. Before she knew it, she too was screaming. "Jackson! Abby! Stop! Stop it now!"

She would care enough to stop it. She did care, more than she ever would've imagined that she could. But no, she hadn't stopped it. Not really. She knew that she was far too late and no matter how terribly she may wish to retract her steps and undo what she had allowed to be done, she couldn't and the horror of it was etched within her, tangible and aching.

The machine was already off, it'd been turned off even before she had developed viscera enough to open her mouth. She had done nothing. Accomplished nothing. She just looked like a desperate fool, calling after the life of a boy who she had stood back and watch slip away.

She forced her gaze to travel to the body beneath the glass, because she had never in her life wanted to see anything less. Clarke had placidly led Finn out of this world with gentle words and a fleeting ghost of pain. His body had been whole, untarnished save for one strike. He had left the world the boy they loved. This. This was a different story.

This was a nightmare and the thing beneath the glass, it was not John Murphy. There had been no gentle words, just a callous read-off of radiation levels. The pain, well in truth she didn't even really want to consider it. How it felt to be torn apart from the inside, to have your flesh rendered to molten hot lava. His body...well there it was, back in her field of vision. Caked with thick black, covered in a diffusion of putrid lesions, and not at all the boy that she had...Hell, she didn't even know. But it didn't matter anymore, anyway.

"Well, that's it. We're all doomed," she heard Roan growl out from his position behind her. His voice was irritated and frustrated, but it very clearly lacked any empathy towards the source of his discontent. He sounded as though Murphy had failed them all somehow. Raven had to bite her tongue to keep a swift spark of animosity from whipping the air.

It was funny really, but in the moment the fact that the whole world was screwed seemed so terribly trifling in comparison to their injustices towards that one slight teenage boy. The death wave could sweep over the world, devastating all it touched, and she thought that she might just choose to stay standing right there, anyway. The thought of the end was not quite enough to drive her feet forward.

Clarke was already back in motion, though, a sick expression pinching her features as she walked towards the body. She lifted the glass enclosure up off of it and then she too froze.

A smell permeated the air, one that would have caught Raven unaware had it not already soured her senses just earlier that day. The heady stench of spoiled skin and free flowing hemoglobin. The intolerable smell that had signified Emori's death, and the one that now accompanied Murphy's.

"He's still breathing," Clarke whispered, her hands snaking forward, towards the bare, bumpy shoulders of the prone boy before her, but then she jerked back before making contact, worried perhaps that death was a contagious demon. That if she touched him then he would take her with him just as he had sworn to.

Abby was by her daughter's side in a second, hovering over Murphy with new wrinkles and twitching eyebrows. She placed her fingers against his neck, anxious as she waited. "There's a heartbeat. Barely, but it's there."

Clarke's eyes met her mother's, silently begging for guidance with the best of her bedside manners. The eyes that asked if death was imminent and the eyes that would know the answer with the slightest of nods. Raven watched for it too, watched close, but Abby did not nod.

Raven wasn't sure how she was meant to feel about that. Haunted likely wasn't the correct answer, but it was the accurate one, nonetheless. Haunted by hopes that could not be permitted to rise. She was certain that his thin, negligible heartbeat would not be enough to support the weight of her wishes and that it would flicker out in mere minutes, leaving her even more devastated than she felt now.

"Abby..." Jackson's voice was low, even, ever the pragmatist in a world of pessimists.

"We wait," Abby whispered, answering his unspoken question, always answering the unspoken questions. Always pretending that she knew what to do even when she didn't. Constantly acting like she had control of situations that only a God could truly influence.

The thought of waiting, more waiting, was insufferable for Raven. More of the same. More of pointlessly standing around watching Murphy claw to cling onto the very edge of life. It was a sport she had been a spectator to so many times before. Too many times before. "No! We're not doing this anymore, it's done!"

Her shouts seemed to catch the rest of the group off-guard, and their gazes snapped to meet hers as she finally moved towards him. _Murphy_.

And then there was a scalpel in her grasp, she was all too intent upon the task at hand to recollect how it had gotten there. "Raven, wait!" Clarke called, hands outstretched to placate her, like she was the monster here, like she was the one slipping. "My mom is right! Luna got worse before she got better! Maybe he's the same! It's worth waiting and seeing."

"Maybe for you," Raven snarled, determination bolstering her vocal chords. Her tone was as unshakable as her resolve and Clarke's hands dropped at the sound of it. "You're not the one lying there..." Raven trailed away momentarily as her eyes fell back onto the wrecked remains of the boy. It was hard to believe that he was so much as marginally alive by the shape of him. "I won't let you prolong his torture, Clarke. Not for the sake of some self-centered false hope."

"I'm not being self-centered, I'm thinking about the whole of the human race. You're the one being selfish; you're the one who's only thinking about Murphy."

"Someone has to," Raven whispered, her cockiness wavering in favor of something more acute, a pain of pinpoint accuracy, and a grief for the delayed nature of her newly established dominance. "He's been through enough, the least you could do is just let him die!" And wasn't that ironic, Murphy the survivalist, Murphy the cockroach, Murphy who Raven was certain would finally be more than willing to just give it all up.

She could hear Roan's heavy footsteps bounding up behind her, she knew that it was now or never, and that it had to be now. She lifted the scalpel and held it airborne above him as she took one last, steadying breath. She held the apparatus in one hand and reached out to set her other hand atop his head. She wanted to do it right, wanted to do it like Clarke would've had she been willing. She wanted to whisper the gentle words that he deserved, but she didn't have the time and she wasn't sure what she should say even if she did. So instead she just found herself softly exhaling his name as she began to run her fingers through his mussy hair. Clumps of brown strands soon started to spill out into her hand, however, and she was forced to halt the only reassuring gesture that she could think to enact.

Her vision was once again blurring with uncharted tears as she lowered the scalpel down against the tarnished, susceptible skin of his neck. She pressed into it and beads of black swam up to the surface, amassing against her metallic tool. It wasn't enough, though, she knew that she'd have to go deeper, put more effort into it. _Into killing him._ Here she was. _Clarke._ And here he was. _Finn._ And all that existed between them was desperation and mercy.

She was transfixed by the sight of his blood staining the scalpel, paralyzed by the notion that she had drew it there. She wasn't sure that she could do this anymore, that she really had it in her. But no, she had no choice. She had be strong enough. For his sake. She tightened her grip on the instrument and started to apply more pressure.

"Sto..."

In truth, it could have been just a breath, but yet she was certain that it was more. She knew now how very wrong she had been. Because even now, even at a time like this, John Murphy hadn't given up.

She let the scalpel tumble down to clatter on the tile floor and she let her tired legs give up and take her down with it. She curled her knees towards her chest as she sat on the ground, too exhausted to be ashamed of her infantile demeanor. She burrowed her head down against her legs and moisture dripped from her eyes to pool on the rough fabric of her pants.

Humanity had hope again, and this time, so did she.

* * *

 **Not going to lie, I have officially bummed myself out. Been wanting to write this for a while, but I haven't written a one-shot in an age. The world needs more Murven, though. Hopefully it turned out decent-ish. If you liked it please tell me and there's a tiny chance I'll write a sequel chapter. Anyway, thank you so much for reading!**


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